The Third Reich at War (110 page)

Prisoners were kept in the tunnels all the time, only seeing the light of day once a week, when they had to stand outside for hours on end during the weekly roll-call. Many had dysentery; those who were too weak to make their way to the parade-ground were beaten mercilessly by the SS, often until they were dead.
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At his subsequent trial in Nuremberg, Speer denied ever having visited a labour camp of any kind, and did not mention the Dora-Central Works complex.
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In fact, however, as his Ministry’s chronicle reveals, Speer visited the new V-2 production centre on 10 December 1943. He later professed himself appalled by the conditions under which the prisoners worked. According to his memoirs, he had immediately ordered the construction of proper accommodation for the prisoners, the improvement of sanitary facilities and the upgrading of their rations.
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But his office chronicle made no mention of any protest; on the contrary, on 17 December 1943 Speer wrote to Kammler congratulating him on his success in setting up the new production centre in two months, an achievement ‘that far exceeds anything ever done in Europe, and is unsurpassed even by American standards’.
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It was not until 13 January 1944 that the Armaments Ministry’s chief physician reported the terrible health situation at the camp, which led to a Ministry investigation. Deaths rose from eighteen in October 1943 to 172 in November 1943 and 670 in December 1943; within six months of the camp’s opening, 2,882 prisoners had died. By March 1944 a crematorium had been installed to deal with the bodies. Only with the arrival of warmer weather and the completion of outside dormitories in May 1944 did the death rate begin to decline.
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Eventually, 20,000 of the 60,000 men forced to work at the V-2 production plant and live in Dora or one of no fewer than thirty sub-camps dotted around the site died of disease, starvation and maltreatment.
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Meanwhile, no sooner had Speer fallen ill, on 18 January 1944, than Himmler moved in to try to take the enterprise over completely and turn it into yet another division of the burgeoning economic empire of the SS. Just over two months later, having failed to persuade Wernher von Braun to go along with his plans, Himmler had the rocketeer, his brother and two of his closest collaborators arrested on charges of belonging to a (completely fictional) left-wing resistance organization and trying to sabotage the rocket programme. Within a short time, however, Speer had pleaded with Hitler, during the Leader’s visit to his sickbed, to order their release. Energetic pressure was also put on the Nazi Leader by Walter Dornberger, the army officer with overall responsibility for the V-2 programme. Himmler was obliged to order the rocketeers’ release on the grounds of their scientific and technical indispensability, and his attempt to take the enterprise over came to nothing. Von Braun’s arrest was to prove convenient when he came to defend his record during the Nazi years after the war by presenting himself as an unpolitical technical expert. His expertise was severely put to the test in the following months, as the rockets kept on blowing up during test flights and the first production models, rushed off the assembly-line at the Central Works, proved equally unsatisfactory. Not surprisingly, the poor physical condition, maltreatment and lack of expertise of the slave-workers led to workmanship of the poorest quality. Constant adjustments and refinements meant that no fewer than 65,000 changes were made to the blueprints by the end of the war. Even when conditions at Dora were improved by the provision of barracks and various amenities, the murderously brutal treatment of the prisoners by guards and overseers continued unabated, and there is no evidence that either Dornberger or von Braun, or for that matter Speer, ever did anything to try to improve the situation. Only in September 1944, when the teething troubles were finally solved, were the first rockets launched against London. Soon the factory was producing more than twenty a day, or up to 700 a month.
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By this time, the management of the production programme had been turned over from the army, which had lost enormously in power and influence after the July 1944 bomb plot, to a limited company set up by the rocketeers to try to forestall the growing influence of Kammler and the SS. Conditions at the Dora camp grew even worse with the arrival on 1 February 1945 of a new commandant, Richard Baer, who had previously served as the last commandant of Auschwitz, with orders to suppress the now-active resistance movement among the inmates. Baer had former German Communists bludgeoned to death and staged a number of mass executions, including one of 162 inmates in March 1945, which the other prisoners were forced to watch. Shortly afterwards the camp was evacuated. Only 600 workers, too sick to be moved, were left at Dora when Allied forces arrived, along with another 405 at a nearby sub-camp. The factory, together with the Peenem̈nde facility, had succeeded in constructing about 6,000 rockets by this time; the Central Works factory also made several thousand V-1 flying bombs. Altogether, 3,200 V-2 rockets had been successfully fired, most of them not at Britain but at targets in Belgium. There was no defence against them: they came down almost vertically at an unstoppable speed, something like 2,000 miles an hour. But they could not carry more than a small conventional payload of a ton of high explosive, and so were unable to cause significant destruction. The total number of people killed by the rocket was no more than 5,000. The V-2 was thus, as its historian Michael Neufeld has remarked, ‘a unique weapon: more people died producing it than died from being hit by it’.
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IV

As early as the spring of 1942, as we have seen, General Fromm, who was to be arrested for his complicity in the bomb plot just over two years later, was already pessimistic about the outcome of the war. But Fromm did not despair completely. He was convinced that the only thing that could win the war in the face of the massive arms programmes being implemented by Britain, America and the Soviet Union would be a super-bomb being developed by a group of physicists under the leadership of the leading theoretical physicists Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg. The attempt made by some extreme Nazi scientists in the 1930s to reject theoretical physics, and especially the theory of relativity, as ‘Jewish’ had been successfully rebuffed by the physics community at a dramatic confrontation in Munich on 15 November 1940.
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Theory, it had resolved, was not Jewish but quintessentially German. A good deal of damage had been done in the meantime, however. The physicists pointed out that, while German scientists in 1927 had published forty-seven articles on nuclear physics, American and British scientists between them had managed only thirty-five. By 1939, however, the ratio had changed dramatically, and the Germans managed only 166 to the Anglo-Americans’ 471. By this time, too, there were thirty particle accelerators in the USA against only one in Germany.
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The potential military consequences were serious. As Hahn had discovered in 1938, if uranium was bombarded by neutrons, it released enough energy to set up a chain reaction with an almost incalculable destructive power. Yet Germany had clearly fallen behind in the race to turn this discovery to practical military use.
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Nevertheless, Heisenberg persisted in trying to develop a nuclear bomb. In doing so, however, he faced insurmountable problems. Although the Danish scientist Niels Bohr had worked out before the war that uranium-235 was the best material for this purpose, Heisenberg and Hahn never managed to calculate the quantity needed for a bomb, nor how to keep the fission process under control during production. They were right in thinking that ‘heavy water’ (an isotope of ordinary water) was needed for this latter purpose, and things looked set for success when the only factory in the world that could produce major quantities of it was captured in Norway in April 1940. But Allied intelligence realized its importance and effectively destroyed the factory in a series of raids by commandos and bomber planes in 1943. Even without this setback, Heisenberg’s team failed to recognize the importance of graphite as well as heavy water in controlling nuclear fission. And even with a massive investment of money and resources it would take two, perhaps three years before an ‘atomic bomb’ could be ready. Like the army generals, Speer knew that the Third Reich simply did not have the leisure to wait. The investment needed would simply divert much-needed resources from meeting the immediate needs of the war economy: aircraft, guns, tanks, ammunition, submarines, men and supplies that were required to inflict total defeat on the Red Army within the next few months, cut off the Atlantic supply-lines of the British, and get ready to meet the onslaught that was undoubtedly coming from the Americans. When lobbied by Heisenberg, Speer was impressed by the idea and gave it some financial resources. But these did not go nearly far enough. As early as the summer of 1942 the basic decision had been made only to allow development on a relatively small scale because Hitler and the leading German economic managers did not expect the war to last more than a few months more, so that the atom-bomb would have to wait until after it was over. The army, which in 1940 had taken over the main centre of research in this area, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, where Heisenberg was based, handed it back to the Reich Research Council, since it no longer seemed to be of direct military relevance.
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Had such a bomb existed, Speer thought later, Hitler would not have had any doubts or hesitations about using it. Watching a newsreel on the bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, ending with a montage showing a plane diving towards a map of the British Isles, which were then blown into the sky, Hitler had remarked to Speer: ‘That is what will happen to them! That is how we will annihilate them!’ Using funds provided by Speer, Heisenberg and his team built a cyclotron that succeeded in splitting an atomic nucleus by the summer of 1944. But there was not enough uranium available to go much further, particularly in view of the fact that Germany’s stocks of the element were needed to provide cores for solid ammunition after supplies of wolframite from Portugal were cut off in 1943.
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Moreover, in any case, the usual infighting within the regime militated against the concentration of effort needed. For there was another team besides Heisenberg’s. It was led by the young physicist Manfred von Ardenne, backed, somewhat improbably, by Reich Postal Minister Wilhelm Ohnesorge. The latter’s friend the court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann persuaded Hitler to take a personal interest in the research. Ardenne was assisted by Kurt Diebner, an army physicist, and a team of about 100 other researchers spread across seventeen different institutions. They made some progress in developing a tactical nuclear weapon of a different kind to Heisenberg’s super-bomb, using enriched plutonium. Later claims that Ardenne’s team succeeded in carrying out test explosions on the Baltic island of R̈gen in October 1944 and later in Thuringia on 3 and 12 March 1945 have met with some scepticism from historians, however. Here too, concentration camp prisoners were used in the construction process, and several hundred died while building the test site in March 1945. Whether or not Ardenne and Diebner were successful, it was all too late to make a difference. By this stage, the necessary supplies of uranium and plutonium could not be obtained.
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Hitler’s backing was also no more than half-hearted, because he still believed at bottom that nuclear physics was a Jewish discipline, as did the Ministry of Education, which did nothing to support research in this area. In any case, even if the money, the men and the materials had been available, time was not. Germany lacked the resources that the United States devoted to the creation of the atomic bomb; and even there, it took until 1945 before the Manhattan Project, with its billions of dollars, huge numbers of scientists and limitless supply of materials, came up with a usable weapon.
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Potentially just as destructive were the nerve gases being developed by the I. G. Farben combine. In 1938 I. G. Farben scientists Schrader, Ambros, R̈diger and Van der Linde had synthesized an extremely deadly organiphosphorus compound which they christened Sarin, after their surnames. As a director of I. G. Farben and head of the special committee in Speer’s Ministry responsible for poison gas, Ambros was in a particularly strong position to develop such chemical agents, of which there was another one, called Tabun, ready to manufacture, and a third, called Soman, synthesized by scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, led by Richard Kuhn, early in 1944. By 1942, factory production of Sarin and Tabun had begun at a site north of Breslau. 12,000 tonnes of Tabun had been produced by June 1944. These nerve agents were tested on animals, and it has been alleged that they were also tried out on concentration camp inmates, though there is no hard evidence for this. But there were serious problems to overcome before they could be deployed. During the development stage, the nerve gases, which were lethal if even a tiny amount came into contact with the skin, had caused convulsions or other injuries in over 300 workers (many of them forced labourers) and at least ten fatalities. The Nazi leader of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, a chemist by training, was none the less enthusiastic about the new chemical weapons: Albert Speer later recalled him saying at this time, over the inevitable glasses of strong wine, stammering with excitement: ‘You know we have this new poison gas - I’ve heard about it. The Leader must do it. He must use it. Now he has to do it! When else! This is the last moment. You too must make him realize that it’s time.’ Hitler did indeed consider using nerve gas against the Red Army. But Speer knew that the factories producing basic ingredients had been damaged so badly in Allied bombing raids that this idea could not be put into practice.
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